


The Mechanicsburg Clock

by Sturzkampf



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, Originally Posted Elsewhere
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-08-22
Packaged: 2018-12-18 18:52:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11880672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sturzkampf/pseuds/Sturzkampf
Summary: A minor incident that took place when Agatha Heterodyne visited the Black Market in Paris. For some reason it never made it into the official biography.





	The Mechanicsburg Clock

It was fortunate that they had Ardsley Wooster with them. His ~~spy’s~~ intelligence agent’s instinct to avoid unwanted attention combined with his British horror of any kind of scene stopped what might have escalated into a major incident before it could begin. While Hoffman helped clear away the debris, Wooster compensated the stall-holder for the loss of his merchandise, (with substantial compensation of course, courtesy of Her Undying Majesty’s Exchequer) and persuaded him not to bother the authorities over such a trivial misunderstanding. After all, receiving a spectacular black eye at the hands of Lady Agatha Heterodyne would not only be good advertising for his business but would also give him a story worth telling in exchange for a free drink for the rest of his life. Meanwhile Violetta led Agatha away and distracted her with all the equipment she could buy on the other stalls and shops in the Parisian Black Market. Wooster was reminded of a caring mother calming a fractious child. Colette Voltaire watched the entire proceedings with the scowl of a disapproving school mistress, no doubt considering how many hours of Agatha’s three days of grace she could deduct for this latest disturbance of the peace. Clearly, her Father hadn’t exaggerated about the Heterodynes.

Wooster placed the receipts in his wallet and wondered how he was going to get an expenses claim for seven novelty clocks approved by the Finance Department. Leaving Hoffman to finish reassembling the stall (With Improvements!), he walked back to the ladies. Fortunately, Agatha seemed in a calm and relaxed frame of mind again. From far too much personal experience he knew that Sparks, and especially the Heterodynes, were like that. The most trivial of circumstances could flip them from pleasant normality to insane murderous rage in an instant. Then five minutes later they’d be their apparently rational selves again, wondering where all the blood had come from.

Zeetha, who had been preoccupied by a stall selling chocolate-coated camembert deep-fried in lard at the time of the fracas, came over for a quiet word.

“What was all that about anyway?” she asked.

Wooster shrugged.

“Nothing really. It seems the clockmaker on that stall had thought to cash in on the Parisian Heterodyne fad, and Lady Heterodyne took exception to one of his products.”

“Seriously? Compared to all the other stuff we’ve seem today, she lost it over a clock? It must have been seriously lewd.” She looked over to the wrecked stall with a malicious grin. “How much does he want for one?”

“Oh, it wasn’t anything like that. Actually, it was quite amusing, in a way. Unfortunately, Lady Heterodyne failed to see the funny side. You see the clock maker made one of those devices that has lots of different clocks, each showing the time in one of the major cities around the world, you know, Londinium, Paris, Berlin, Milan, St Petersburg, Mumbai, Beijing… and, of course, Mechanicsburg, the largest dial in the centre with all the others surrounding it. He called it the Mechanicsburg Clock.”

“Not even a picture of Agatha with hardly any clothes on? What’s so provocative about that?”

“Well, the trouble was that the dial for Mechanicsburg didn’t have any mechanism. It just had the hands painted on the clock face, at the exact time when Baron Wulfenbach activated his time-stop device.”

**Author's Note:**

> The characters depicted here are the creations of Studio Foglio. Originally posted on the Jägerkin Forum.


End file.
